Kate Gleason, who in 1884 was the first woman admitted to study engineering at Cornell, was in 1918 the first woman elected to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. She also designed low-cost housing in Rochester using a concrete-pouring process that she invented.
Raymond Donald Starbuck (Civil Engineering, B.A., 1900) a famed Cornell football player. He was the fullback on the varsity football team in 1899 and 1900. He was captain of the football team in 1899 and 1900 and was selected as an All-American in 1900. In..Read More
William Durand, a mechanical engineering professor from 1891 to 1904, was instrumental in forming the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) in 1915, which was the forerunner of NASA. Durand helped to plan the committee’s first laboratory at Langley Field.
Thomas Sze, 1905, was one of Cornell’s earliest Chinese graduates, earning a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering. As a proud alum he went on to become a driving force behind the building of China’s national railway system (1909-1910), helping to influence the direction of a nation.
Nora Stanton Blatch Barney became the first woman to graduate from Cornell with an engineering degree in 1905. The daughter and granddaughter of suffragists, she studied civil engineering, and her groundbreaking career included working for the New York Public Service Commission as an assistant engineer..Read More
Charles Manly (M.S.,1898) invented and built the first gasoline engine used for aviation. He also piloted an early experimental aircraft called the Great Aerodrome, built in collaboration with the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (Samuel Langley), but the early experiments were not successful and Manly..Read More
Two graduate students Ernest Schoder (Ph.D., 1902) and August Saph (Ph.D., 1902) working in the Hydraulics Laboratory authored what was to become one of the classic studies in hydraulic experimentation. Their precise measurements on frictional resistance to the flow of water in pipes served as..Read More
Albert F. Zahm, (Engineering, M.E., 1892) an early aeronautical experimenter and a chief of the Aeronautical Division of the U.S. Library of Congress built America’s first significant wind tunnel and helped organize the first international conference on aeronautics in 1893
Physical Review, America’s first physics-only scientific journal, was founded at Cornell in 1893. It was founded by faculty member, Edward L. Nichols, (Physics, 1875), who edited it with the help of two of his colleagues, Ernest Merritt (Physics, M.S., 1886) and Frederick Bedell (Physics, Ph.D.,..Read More
An electric elevator was invented in 1891 by Frederick Bedell (Physics, Ph.D., 1892) while he was still a grad student. His invention was an improvement over the hydraulic elevators that couldn’t reach the upper floors of New York City’s rising skyline. Bedell was later appointed..Read More